Scientific communities need cutting‐edge collaborative observational facilities to test models and to enable ground‐breaking discoveries. The acquisition of fundamental new data often leads to transformative advances in research that have significant societal and economic benefits. Grand challenges in physical sciences often require grand facilities. Several scientific communities, not including Earthquake Science so far, have realized grand‐challenge facilities. Particle physicists use very large accelerators to study properties of elementary particles. Astronomers send state‐of‐the‐art telescopes to space to improve their observations. Space missions deploy rovers and other instrumentation on nearby planets and space probes to advance planetary sciences. Such efforts involve infrastructure with prices ranging in the U.S. dollars or more.

Full reference: Yehuda Ben‐Zion, Gregory C. Beroza, Marco Bohnhoff, Alice‐Agnes Gabriel, Paul Martin Mai; A Grand Challenge International Infrastructure for Earthquake Science. Seismological Research Letters 2022;; 93 (6): 2967–2968. doi: https://doi.org/10.1785/0220220266